Tag: school

Bassy, as everyone in the family calls Sebastian, used to drive Eric around their neighborhood, showing off the same Maybach-borrowed from Jay-Z-that he would use on the spring day he graduated Lincoln High School and jumped straight to the pros. One apartment over was Jamel Thomas, Ethan’s older brother and the first member of the Telfair branch of the family tree to break through on the court. Eric, 21, and Ethan, 23, may represent the final generation of New York basketball royalty. The message is clear: “The family is pushing the same dream on Ethan, and this kid is standing under a very big shadow,” Hock says. The dream Eric and Ethan shared wasn’t the usual hoop dream, because the Marburys and Telfairs aren’t a regular family. The older brother even dubbed Ethan “the best player in the family” in a New York magazine profile following the 2004 draft. “He didn’t take basketball as seriously as Bassy when he was a child,” says Thomas, who would always tell Ethan to never compare himself to his brother. Ethan’s first stop was at an unaccredited basketball factory in Las Vegas.

New Castle County, which includes Wilmington and its suburbs, is nearly two-thirds white; the city of Wilmington, on the other hand, was 58 percent black as of the 2010 census. Wilmington City Council President Hanifa Shabazz told me that these factors, among others, have contributed to the spike in gun violence in Wilmington. In December 2013 she spearheaded a unanimously passed resolution to bring in the CDC to study the crisis in Wilmington – not as a gun issue, but as a matter of public health. These are tragically common stories, as a majority of the shootings in Wilmington go unsolved; the News Journal reported earlier this year that only 38 percent of shootings in Wilmington were cleared, as opposed to a 60 percent clearance nationally. “If our officers were more careful [with guns], then maybe people in the city of Wilmington would be more careful with how they use guns,” she said. According to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives statistics, 388 guns were traced and recovered in Wilmington in 2016, out of more than 1,000 in the state overall. A majority of the illegal guns recovered in Delaware came from in-state, but 86 came from Pennsylvania, which has more relaxed gun laws and a border 15 minutes from Wilmington. Harris spent 14 years in prison for murder before being released in 2008; after getting out, he became a community activist, working on anti-violence efforts with the group Cease Violence Wilmington and as a youth employment coordinator with an alternative discipline school in the city.

I tweeted the title “Why Dance Is as Important as Math in Education.” I had a lot of positive responses and a number of incredulous ones. One tweet said, “Isn’t that going to be one of the shortest lectures ever?” Another said flatly, “Ken, dance is not as important as math.” One person tweeted, “So what? Telephones are more important than bananas. Ants are not as important as toilet ducks. Paper clips are more important than elbows.” Some responses were more pertinent: “Is that so? Important for what and to whom? By the way I’m a math teacher.” In Dance Education around the World: Perspectives on Dance, Young People and Change, researchers Charlotte Svendler Nielsen and Stephanie Burridge bring together recent studies of the value of dance in all kinds of settings: from Finland to South Africa, from Ghana to Taiwan, from New Zealand to America. The low status of dance in schools is derived in part from the high status of conventional academic work, which associates intelligence mainly with verbal and mathematical reasoning. Dance can help restore joy and stability in troubled lives and ease the tensions in schools disrupted by violence and bullying. A number of professional dance companies offer programs for schools. Using dance, the organization aims to improve social relationships especially among genders and to enrich the culture of the schools by cultivating collaboration, respect and compassion. Dance education has important benefits for students’ social relationships, particularly among genders and age groups.

She hid in the auditorium while Nikolas Cruz was firing on her classmates: Gonzalez says that as she waited in the dark room at Marjory Stoneman Douglas on February 14, she searched Google News for updates. Her father fled Cuba and is a lawyer: Gonzalez was born in the US. Her dad sought refuge from Fidel Castro’s regime by moving to New York in 1968. Her mother is a math tutor and worries about her: In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes,” mom, Beth, reminded viewers that Gonzalez is still young despite the strength she’s displaying: “It’s like she built herself a pair of wings out of balsa wood and duct tape and jumped off a building, and we’re just like running along beneath her with a net, which she doesn’t want or think that she needs.”She’s says being open about her sexuality has helped propel her activism: Gonzalez has been president of her school’s Gay-Straight Alliance for three years. She shaved her head two weeks before school began in September. She’s been on the cover of Time: The April 2 issue of the magazine features Marjory Stoneman Douglas students who are leading the national conversation about gun control. Along with Gonzalez, it also features David Hogg, Cameron Kasky, Alex Wind and Jaclyn Corin with the word “ENOUGH,” written in bold letters and imposed across the image. She’s still planning on college after graduation: Just four days before the shooting, Gonzalez went on a tour of New College of Florida in Sarasota. That’s still her plan, People magazine reported.

You can now get away with dream-the-impossible-dream rhetoric, once disdained as American psychobabble. Optimism – even, and perhaps especially in the face of difficulty – has long been an American hallmark. “What the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending,” the novelist William Dean Howells supposedly said. Of course, there are many varieties of American optimism. There’s the American dream, which holds that you can achieve whatever you want by working hard enough. There’s the idea of American exceptionalism – that we’re uniquely blessed and fated to succeed, so our problems must inevitably be fixed. The one form of American optimism that’s still credible is the kind that’s coming from the high school students in Parkland, Fla. In the best part of the American tradition, these kids – and others like them – aren’t just whining.

For months now, teachers everywhere have heard students talk about Fortnite, the world’s latest obsession, nonstop. Everyone is playing it, teens say, so schools have tried to ban it. What makes Fortnite different is that it is a meaty and intense game that everyone is playing, because it’s free. Plus, if you’re bad at Fortnite, you can still just watch others play and have a blast. According to Nick Fisher, the teacher with the Fortnite mobile confiscation bin Tweet, part of what makes Fornite so viral for kids is that its culture is tied to social media. Players feel compelled to talk about Fortnite with other people, to make their prowess public. Phones are enough of a neccesity that students can use them during designated times, like lunch breaks, but there’s still some marvel over how much Fortnite is taking over student’s lives. Fortnite isn’t the only shooter occupying student’s minds right now, as PUBG also released on mobile earlier this month.

The 1,124 NCAA member schools comprise less than a third of all four-year institutions in the U.S., noted NCAA chief research scientist Tom Paskus. In sixth grade, the year when his hometown was among the nation’s most dangerous, his parents, Ed and Vanessa Waters, decided to move him from the local public schools to a private school, Greens Farms Academy, 45 minutes by train to the west, in Fairfield County. Repeating sixth grade at the Greens Farms Academy while playing up with the high school team each of those years means that Waters is now in his eighth year of high school ball. He’s finishing out at Notre Dame High School, back home in New Haven, where he can spend more time with his parents before heading to college. Coppin State’s Grant finds players through the same pipeline as John Thompson III found Waters: the elite club teams that aggregate and groom talent as early as grade school so that private high schools and colleges can scout them at summer tournaments. An invitation from a sponsored elite team on the summer circuit and a scholarship to a Washington Catholic Athletic Conference school, both of which can serve as fast tracks to Division 1 hoops. It raises questions about whether sixth-graders who couldn’t snag a $33,000 prep school scholarship – or manage a 45-minute commute by train – can find their way to a college scholarship. The rule ultimately adopted also created a backdoor for schools to make room for athletes who didn’t meet the 2.3 GPA standard: the “Academic redshirt.” Recruits who fail to pass 10 core courses in their first two years of high school can still receive scholarship aid as long as they earn a 2.0 GPA – they just can’t compete as freshmen.

We cannot stand idly by as the country continues to be infected by a plague of gun violence that seeps into community after community, and does irreparable damage to the hearts and minds of the American people. We believe federal and state governments must put these in place to ensure that mass shootings and gun violence cease to be a staple of American culture. Just as the department of motor vehicles has a database of license plates and car owners, the Department of Defense should have a database of gun serial numbers and gun owners. This data should be paired with infractions of gun laws, past criminal offenses and the status of the gun owner’s mental health and physical capability. Thanks to loopholes, people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to buy firearms are able to purchase them at gun shows and secondhand sales. If we are serious about preventing people from purchasing deadly weapons, we must monitor sales that take place at gun shows and on secondhand markets. Allow the CDC to make recommendations for gun reform. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should be allowed to conduct research on the dangers of gun violence.

Ever since the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Sosa has felt on edge, like it could actually happen to her again, particularly since her high school – like more than 1,000 others nationwide – received threats after Parkland. “There are people at our school who are scared it’s going to happen here,” said Nelson, who previously attended a high school in Marysville, Washington, where a student shot and killed four others in 2014. In the four years between the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas and those in Marysville and Roswell, there have been hundreds of school shootings, yet none has affected Americans quite like the massacre in Parkland that left 17 dead. Parkland’s aftermath has prompted the strongest and most sustained push for gun control and reform since the slaughter of 26 elementary schoolchildren and teachers in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012. There’s an assumption that every outspoken teenager who’s made it through a school shooting will join their fellow survivors, fists up for gun control. There may be an assumption that living through a school shooting can transform a young person’s views – making them more anti-gun – but it’s not that simple. Rather, her school focused on counseling its students and bussing in survivors of another school shooting that occurred a month earlier in Colorado to console them. Nonpartisan approaches following attacks at Marysville-Pilchuck; at Madison Junior/Senior High School in Middletown, Ohio, where a 14-year-old shot and wounded two students in a lunchroom; and at Freeman High School in Rockford, Washington, where one student was killed and three others injured. Most of the time when there is a school shooting, it’s not like Parkland; fewer people are killed or injured, though it can produce the same trauma for survivors, knowing what it sounds like to hear gunshots ricochet down a school hallway.

We need to shift from an intervention mindset – trying to shift young men’s conceptions of masculinity after they’ve already been formed – to a prevention mindset in which we help boys develop healthier ideas about gender to start with. Research suggests middle school could be an ideal time to inoculate boys against toxic masculinity. Middle school boys’ ability to resist traditional masculine norms is relatively strong, but weakens when they get to high school. Maine Boys to Men, a program that has long worked with high school boys, is developing a curriculum for middle school boys that teaches them to see and sidestep the rigid gender roles they’re already growing into. MBTM adapted its high school curriculum for a middle school audience and tested it during the 2015-2016 academic year, reaching just over 500 boys in southern Maine. The idea is simple: the group leader draws a big box on the chalkboard, and the boys brainstorm stereotypes of masculinity. The completed visual serves as a jumping off point to discuss how confining traditional masculinity can be and how harmful to both boys and girls, both men and women. Feedback from the middle school boys is almost universally positive, with most of them saying they’re going to change the way they talk to people or adjust their judgments about how others do gender.